In August of last year I was asked to write an article for the end-of-year issue of Information Age about what I thought was important in 2010.  As we all know, the last year has been tumultuous and predicting what was important in the next month has been hard enough let alone predicting the next year.

Nonetheless, I’m always up for a challenge, wrote the article and then promptly forgot about it.  When the magazine came out, I was curious to re-read what I’d written.  The theme of the article was a focus on agility in the face of uncertainty.  This is easy to say, but writing for the CIO audience I emphasised that in tough times business tries to reduce cost (which means focusing on efficiency of existing processes) and defend against market events (which means emergency system changes).  Neither of these trends generally leads to flexible business systems.

In the article I suggest the demand that will come during the recovery will be unpredictable, making life for the reactive CIO almost impossible.  I used books which many non-technology executives will have read (The Black Swan and Predictably Irrational) to help CIOs to make the case to focus on the data asset.

The article is available online: Information Age (Agile on the rebound).

Well thought through online strategies can do so much more than deliver high quality web sites for internal and external users. They can dramatically improve some of your business fundamentals. There are few things more fundamental than the quality of your data.

When people think of data quality they often focus first on customer data. One of the best ways to ensure that customer data is right is to provide a way for your own customers to update their details online. On its own, this is an important capability, but to be really effective it needs to be linked to something that the customer regularly does on the web, such as reviewing their accounts, orders or other interactions with your organisation. Truly effective businesses make updating customer details part of every interaction and available to all stakeholders in the customer, effectively building a Facebook-like facility for their customers identifying relationships (friends), preferences and activities.

Apart from enhanced customer service, it is worth remembering that it is much harder to maintain a fraudulent identify when you are connected through multiple relationships and you have to maintain an exponential number of fronts.

Business data includes much more than just customer details. Online collaboration both inside and outside the enterprise can enhance almost all data in some way. One of the most common problems businesses face is maintaining an accurate understanding of the definition of complex business terminology. Every organisation develops their own language and expects staff, customers and business partners to understand it. Worse, few maintain a dictionary of this language.

Consider creating such a dictionary, with components that are visible internally, other parts to business partners and a relevant subset to the world in general. To really leverage the power of the web, make this dictionary readily updatable (even using a wiki). While open to misuse, it is unlikely that internal staff or business partners who are easily traced will deliberately abuse the privilege. Online communities have shown that complex topics attract genuinely interested contributors who can often provide a better explanation to their peers that you could hope to publish either from an insight or simple labour perspective.

Finally having learnt to use the web to better maintain customer data and your data dictionary, it rapidly becomes obvious that many datasets would be candidates to be open to a wider community for monitoring, comment or even enhancement. Consider lists of branches, community contacts and products. In the last case, suppliers sometimes make changes which flow through your supply chain without being updated in online catalogues.

If there is one thing we’ve learnt, the fear that we feel about opening our content up for collaboration is often disproportionate to the real risk of misuse. If you succumb to this fear without carefully considering what you are worried about, then you’ll miss out on the power that the crowd can bring to our business.

Readers interested in these concepts should read further about the intersection of Enterprise 2.0 and Information Management in MIKE2.0, in particular the MIKE2.0 Enterprise 2.0 Solution Offering.

As I described in my last post, the quantity of information being generated globally and within each of our organisations is absolutely overwhelming.  All good managers facing a large problem start by trying to break the task down into manageable pieces.  The question information managers face is what is the right starting point for breaking enterprise information into such manageable pieces.  I’ve seen organisations start with technology (structured database, records, documents, email, HTML etc.).  I’ve seen others start by the subject being covered (customer, finance, human resources, product etc.).

A better approach is to ask how the information is used by the business.  Over many years, I have come to the conclusion that there are four ways that information is used.

The first use is the measurement of performance from executive to operations (for example the Balanced Scorecard).  The second use is to navigate the organisation via location, product, staff, customer or other common concepts (for example Master Data or Dimensional Models).  The third is to describe the business in an abstract or atomic way (for example third normal form data models in the data warehouse or the Enterprise Content Management repository).  Finally, the fourth is the operational system data which sits in front of the customer or production-line process.

Readers who are interested in exploring these ideas further can read a more detailed article on the Four Layers of Information.

Richard Wray, writing recently in The Guardian, pointed out that the volume of data held is now estimated at 487 billion GB.  To put this in perspective he explained that in printed form this would form a pile that would stretch to Pluto 10 times over.  The really staggering statistic, however, was that if this data were printed then the stack would grow faster than NASA’s fastest rocket.  I haven’t checked the stats, but a quick back of the envelope calculation suggests he’s in the right order of magnitude.

What does this mean?  Apart from the staggering numbers, it tells us that the problem for organisations isn’t holding large amounts of information – they already do that.  Nor is the problem necessarily how to index that information – increasingly they have defined information standards to do that.  The real problem is its continual growth – very few taxonomies or models properly account for the rapid rate of growth.

MIKE2.0 hosts a new generation of Information Management techniques which are designed to deal less with the data you have now and more with the data that you are likely to gain in the future.   A great place to start is with the SAFE architecture.

It’s tough out there if you’re trying to kick off a critical information management program. Whereas most clients I speak with want to significantly improve their capability in how they manage information, they find it tough to get funding for major programs of work This is where I believe some real benefits come through for MIKE2.0 – you can still get a comprehensive, highly relevant approach more quickly though reuse of the framework:

You can use the approach to drive cost reduction, through a comprehensive approach for:
• Technology and system consolidation
• Alignment of common information management programs
• Operational efficiency through better data quality and efficiency

You can reuse free content and improve delivery quality:
• A common, open framework that can be reused across all your projects
• A common, open framework for external providers
• Free collaboration technology

You can build momentum for your priority business initiatives:
• Make sure you have a fact-based business case
• Improve data and analytical capabilities to meet new business demands
• Prepare for major changes related to merger integration

I find businesses will spend money these days on information management – you just need a strong “case for change”. To read more, check out the extreme blueprinting and roadmapping approach to building a transformational IM strategy and some recent Case Studies.

I had the pleasure of meeting Maria Villar at the IBM’s Information on Demand Conference where she presented on her new book – Managing Your Business Data. Its a great book for someone looking to make the “case for change” for treating information as an asset across the enterprise, building a culture of better information management and establishing roles and responsibilities for better data management across the organization.  There’s a wealth of information in there – and its something a business leader can understand just as well as a technologist. I particularly liked blending the conceptual (Maslow’s needs hierarchy for data management) with the pragmatic (lots of cases studies).

Maria tells me the book will be on Amazon soon but in the meantime you can order direct from the publisher at the link above.

My experience is that many big, complex organizations need an approach based on Information Management Transformation – a radical change to how they manage their information that is referred to as Information Development in MIKE2.0. But transformation is hard and there is a need to show value quickly. I’ve seen agile development techniques work for Software Development; can they work for Information Development?

The idea behind Agile Information Development is to provide an approach to most quickly deliver Information Management engagements using the MIKE2.0 Methodology. Agile development processes can be difficult for information management engagements due to the complexity of historical issues. Agile Information Development makes use of the techniques in XBR, Continuous Implementation and Continuous Improvement and accelerates them further. These techniques are from strategy through to implementation.

To find out more, go to the Agile Information Development Solution Offering. It’s in the early stages, so please jump in and help out!

Organizations typically suffer from a lack of standards around information management. They develop standards on their own although they may use external reference materials. The issue is that most of the standards are definitional, but not validation-based. That is, the standards may say how a data warehouse model should be developed or provide a policy about how reference data should be synchronized.

What is missing is the validation step against these standards. What would be valuable are validation tools that test areas such as complexity while the solution is being developed. When we have simple tools like those used for W3C Markup Validation Service it will be a big help in the industry.

I have been writing quite a bit lately about the topic of Governance 2.0/Networked Information Governance, including an earlier post in this blog. Networked Information Governance = Information Governance + Enterprise 2.0. The idea for the name came from an excellent article published by Paul Strassman in 2001. At the time of its authoring in 2001, networked business models were continuing to grow in popularity, from the military to the most agile Fortune 2000 organizations. What it pre-dated was the radical advances in collaborative technologies would occur over the next few years to bring together “informal networks” that are so relevant in the application of governance. When it comes to bringing the informal network together with a formal approach, technologies and techniques from Enterprise 2.0 are a great fit: collaboration, search, tagging and aggregation are the keys to bridging the gap.

I wrote a more detailed post on this subject on FastForward and recently posted on presentation on slideshare.

One of the key questions is who should sponsor Information Managements.  The governance sections of MIKE2.0 describes operational organizations and how to get there, but makes the assumption that the CEO, CIO, CFO etc. are supportive of the initiative and will act as sponsors.  What happens when they’re not?

Actually, it seems that this is the case more often than you would wish with many senior executives unwilling to commit to the proper management of information.  It’s not hard to work out the reason why, in most companies (and increasingly in many government organizations) the CEO is only appointed for a short contract with rapid rotation of new talent into the role.  No wonder the CEO acts like a politician looking for the “quick fix” common sense answer that they can put in place within their term and position themselves to be extended (analogous to a politician seeking re-election),

There is hope, however, by looking at the board.  In most companies, board members have a longer tenure than CEOs and also feel more exposed to legal issues.  A quick conversation about the issues of ledger versus non-ledger data (discussed before in this blog) highlights to board members how great their exposure is if they don’t mandate better governance.  Judicious use of passionate middle managers can complete the pincer movement and before you know it the CEO sees Information Management as a mandatory activity and a quick win.